


Tattoos and memories (dead skin on trial)

by myhappyface



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-17
Updated: 2010-10-17
Packaged: 2017-10-12 18:16:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myhappyface/pseuds/myhappyface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angel and Gunn try to hold themselves together.  Post-NFA.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tattoos and memories (dead skin on trial)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for carlyinrome for the AtS Prompt-a-Thon.

Always being the one to walk away after a fight means a couple of things.

One: you are the winner.

Two: you forget what it is like to lose.

  


Gunn wakes up to the drone of the heart monitor and the muted rush of people beyond his door. Angel is sitting by the bed, incongruous in green scrubs.

"What --" he starts to say, and realizes he doesn't have the air for it. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he sees Fred, paging through a magazine, a sight warm and familiar enough that he wants to smile, but she lifts her head and her eyes aren't Fred's eyes, not any more, and in its awful pantomime it asks, "Does this form disturb you?"

He closes his eyes.

  


Angel is back at dusk, mercifully wearing his own clothes again, and makes noises about Illyria keeping watch outside the hospital. He says he thinks killing the dragon terminated their contract. Gunn isn't so sure, but he'll go along with it for as long as he can.

  


What Gunn discovers when he's discharged a few days later - "We're sorry, Mr. Gunn, but you don't seem to have any insurance. Here is a list of things you are not currently allowed to do and may perhaps never be able to do again. Good luck with your sucking gut wounds!" - is that the contract being terminated means, somehow, that Angel has been camping out in his old apartment. Gunn knows it's the first time he's been over since, in a fit of paternal overprotectiveness, he had come by Gunn's place to make sure it was babyproofed.

"The hotel got a little -- blown up," Angel tells him apologetically. "Or it might have been yanked into another dimension. I'm not really clear on the specifics."

Gunn's pretty used to seeing bags of blood hanging in the fridge due to basically living at the hotel for an entire year, but navigating his kitchen/bedroom/cubicle-bathroom in the wheelchair already looks impossible enough; he's not sure how two six-foot plus men are supposed to share that kind of space.

He remembers pulling wrangling duty for Wesley, though, way back in the stone age before they hated each other, and eventually says, "Yeah, fine. Whatever."

  


Later, Angel gives him the price of their battle charge: Spike is dust, Lindsey is dead, Wesley is still dead, and Lorne is gone, probably forever, probably for good reason. You can do terrible things out of love, for love, but looking your friends in the eye afterward is another thing entirely.

Illyria is sometimes there, but Gunn tries to be asleep for as many of those times as he can manage, and between his intensely painful injuries and the suspicious tasting Vicodin knock-offs, he manages pretty well.

  


Angel sticks close to home for the first few weeks and they settle into a routine: Gunn sleeps all the time, and occasionally Angel pries him out of the bed to piss and shower. As far as Gunn can tell, Angel only goes out once, to the butcher's, and spends the rest of his time clearing the floor so Gunn can get around and sitting on the couch, watching movies and pretending like he can't smell the blood from Gunn's wounds.

It's easy to get sick of your own company, Gunn already knows, but he didn't realize how easy it was to get sick of your own company when you're not alone, so when one of his neighbors turns up to ask for help, it feels like the only good thing that has happened to him in the last two years. Anita's brother used to run with Gunn's old crew, and maybe still does, but what Gunn remembers of his fighting isn't all that impressive, so maybe he doesn't.

"They all go missing after dark," she's saying, and Angel turns to look at him. It might be one of the things Wolfram & Hart sent after them, or it might be a garden-variety Los Angeles whacko, but whichever it is, Angel's going solo on this one. All Gunn can really do at the moment is make sure he's well-armed.

  


Angel gets back a little before dawn and considerately takes off his blood-soaked jacket before falling back onto the couch.

"Just a couple of vampires. I cleaned out a nest in the park," he says after a while.

"So these aren't on us, huh," Gunn says, a little surprised, but Angel doesn't reply.

He'll go by Anita's when the sun comes up, tell her the good news. He will be very careful not to ask about her brother.

  


Word spreads that Gunn is back in the building with muscle to back him up and people start dropping by. Not a lot, and not many who can pay, but Gunn figures they can worry about that when the rent is due. Even sidelined as he is, it's the most like himself he's felt in a very long time.

In the absence of other contenders, the stitching and bandaging Angel usually required falls to Gunn, which often leads to more exasperated bickering than had occurred in the whole of their friendship.

"It's not like I'm going to scar," Angel says.

"Laugh at me again and I'm sticking this needle in your eye," Gunn replies, focusing very carefully on his mostly-neat stitches and missing Cordelia desperately.

"I'm just saying," Angel says, somewhat rebuked.

"Look, man, I have _one job_. . . " Gunn says, and Angel wraps his hand around Gunn's wrist, briefly, and endures the rest of the process in silence.

  


After Alonna died, there weren't a lot of people around who touched Gunn out of love, just things that wanted to kill him; nothing but the struggle. One of the best things about buddying up with Wes had been the place to express physical affection: secret, complicated handshakes and strong-armed claps on the back and shadowboxing like kids, when he could goad Wes into it, and Fred had been different and the same, all at once: they would hold hands and bump shoulders and get so close that every part of her felt like a part of him.

This is, he thinks, what he's been missing. The fact that it's a dead guy giving him that connection is just one more ridiculous thing about his life; he can deal with it.


End file.
